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| Senility as wish fulfillment. |
I've already written a full review of Jo Walton's My Real Children, but I want to talk
about something not in my review, and in no review I've yet read. The novel
follows Patricia Cowan as she suffers a peculiar senility, forgetting most of
her life, and then seeming to recall two different lives in high detail. Late
in the novel, we see how the onset of senility hits her in both lives, and in
one her lover dies. Patricia immediately hopes her senility will make her
forget the death happened. This excited me.
For the last two years of his life, I called my grandfather
every night to make sure he had at least a little daily contact with a family
member. He hated living in an old folks home, and was very demented on top of
that. Our nightly contact made him remember me more than the other
grandchildren, though there were still calls when he mistook me for his son,
friend, and on one night, his mother. Living that intensely with a disability
can stifle the way you think about it. It's easier to default to a somber,
anodyne mode, both in avoiding conflicts, and in taking your mind off of
things. It takes a different mind to see something so painful and be creative
with it.
In reading that paragraph of Walton's novel, I wasn't offended. It was enlivening to read someone subvert our default thoughts of dementia, and simultaneously, tap into those desires, because in moments of weakness we've all wanted to forget things. In the moment, I could only compare it to FX's Archer.
I'm probably the only person to parallel My Real Children and Archer, but one of
Archer's great strengths is its anarchic sense of humor. People mistake the
show as dark, but it features the lightest hearted graphic tiger mauling I've
ever seen. The series uses the drug trade, asphyxia fetishes, eco-terrorism,
homophobia and the Oedipal complex as fodder for amazing character humor. It is
neither didactic nor cynical; it's creative enough with its deployment of
highly flawed characters to avoid offense while depicting the people themselves
as intensely offensive. This is great for some audiences (like me), but also
stifles how others think about creativity in danger zones, making them think it
has to be transgressive.
Archer is often transgressive, as is most comedy about touchy
subjects, because that's the easy edge for a laugh. But take George Carlin's early
performances of The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television. For the first six he's
juvenile and profane – and then he hits "fuck." It's the beginning of
life, he says, and yet it's something we use to hurt each other. Very rare for
George Carlin, he isn't sure about his footing on a topic, and only has one
joke, before saying he'll try to make a full bit out of it next year. He did,
and the later versions have never been as interesting to me. That he's
vulnerable and unsure about something so touchy, after being so flippant about
the other touchy subjects is a haunting deviation.
As I've aged, I've become increasingly attracted to artists who can remain creative in danger zones. It seems either the hardest thing to do (plausible) or so risky to market that it's avoided (also plausible). Certainly if you botch your attempt at a new angle on pedophilia then you can offend a wide audience. But if you try, you might get John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, and that scene wherein the pedophile Hakan rents a child prostitute, but is then so disturbed by how the boy is treated that he tries to give him enough money to run away. This foreshadows the compassionate angle Lindqvist later casts over the vampire/familiar relationship. The compassion of a pedophile in an otherwise uncaring world was so unexpected that it gave me goosebumps, where most vampire stories give me boredom.
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| A predator in need of companionship. |
These deviations stir me up. In most art you can get a sense of how touchy subjects will be handled; Grimdark Fantasy will probably slouch
into rape, and a children's cartoon will probably avoid or didactically
instruct about disabilities. Predictable paths are not always wrong, and often
writing from a place of reliable sensitivity can avoid opening wounds. But I
don't accept the failure state of attempted creativity in a danger zone as
loathsome. My general reaction is discomfort for an author who probably knows
they screwed up on something meaningful. It reads like seeing someone fall when both of us thought they should have flown.